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Boiled Pheasant, with Celery Sauce

A pheasant boiled in milk and served with a celery sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pheasant and cream work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 112 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Boiled Pheasant, with Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the pheasant

  1. Place the trussed pheasant in a stewpan, breast side up, and cover with 3 pints of milk.

  2. Bring to a boil quickly, then reduce heat and simmer gently until cooked: 30 minutes for a small bird, 50 minutes for a large one, and 1 hour for an old one.

Make the celery sauce

  1. Wash and slice the celery, then boil in ¾ pint of milk until soft.

  2. Rub the cooked celery through a fine sieve and return to the saucepan.

  3. Boil the celery mixture quickly for 10 minutes, then stir in ½ cup of thick cream.

Serve

  1. Serve some sauce over the pheasant and the rest in a tureen.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pheasant + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  2. Pheasant + celerytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Celery + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,863 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Milk + celerytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pheasant
Is the main protein, cooked gently in milk until tender.
Milk
Gently poaches the pheasant and cooks the celery, giving a mild, creamy base.
White celery
Provides the main flavour and, once puréed, the body of the sauce.
Thick cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the pheasant gently. Boiling hard after the initial bring-to-a-boil can toughen the meat and cause the milk to scorch or curdle on the pan base. A gentle simmer cooks the bird evenly and keeps the poaching liquid smooth.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, milk, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Celerythe original
  3. Garlicfits less well
  4. Cinnamonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, milk, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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